The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Without the boy, he could not have managed his work as minister. But the lad had lost so much time in his law studies that he could never recover. Yet he had shown himself adept in foreign affairs, demonstrating sagacity and judgment, a facility in the French language, and a general knowledge of how a minister’s office ought to be conducted. One day he would make the Congress a fine minister. “In the mean time, if they shall think fit to employ him as a secretary to their minister at any European court, I am persuaded they will have reason to be satisfied with his conduct, and I shall be thankful for his appointment as a favour to me.”

  Franklin’s gloom persisted into summer. In July 1781 he learned that the Congress had appointed Robert Morris superintendent of American finances. Franklin knew the successful merchant from Philadelphia; they had served together on the Pennsylvania Council of Safety, on the Secret Committee of the Continental Congress, and on the Committee of Secret Correspondence. It was fair to say that Morris had few secrets from Franklin, and these did not include the large profits Morris made—if not at the public expense, then at least from the public treasury. But Morris’s profits were no secret from anyone. “He has vast designs in the mercantile way,” John Adams remarked. “And no doubt pursues mercantile ends, which are always gain.” Yet, speaking of Morris’s service in the Congress, Adams added, “He is an excellent member of our body.” Morris himself acknowledged his intention to serve self and country at once. “I shall continue to discharge my duty faithfully to the public, and pursue my private fortune by all such honourable and fair means as the times will admit of.” Tom Paine attacked Morris in the press for growing fat at a time when Continental troops were growing gaunt. But in the desperation of the winter of 1780–81, Congress suppressed such scruples as some of its members had and handed American finances to Morris, appreciating that while the signature of the president of the Congress meant nothing to the money men, the signature of Morris meant a great deal.

  Franklin greeted Morris’s appointment with pleasure. “From your intelligence, integrity, and abilities, there is reason to hope every advantage that the public can possibly receive from such an office,” he wrote Morris. Yet he warned Morris what he had got himself into—and in doing so transparently revealed an aspect of his own feelings about the nature of public service. “The business you have undertaken is of so complex a nature, and must engross so much of your time and attention as necessarily to injure your private interests; and the public is often niggardly, even of its thanks, while you are sure of being censured by malevolent critics and bug-writers, who will abuse you while you are serving them, and wound your character in nameless pamphlets, thereby resembling those little dirty stinking insects that attack us only in the dark, disturb our repose, molesting and wounding us while our sweat and blood are contributing to their subsistence.”

  Morris indeed suffered the sort of abuse Franklin forecast, even as his efforts allowed Washington’s army to fight another season. This by itself was a victory, and in keeping with Washington’s overall strategy. Despite his continuing worries about money and mutinies, Washington’s aim was straightforward: to keep fighting. The longer the rebellion lasted, the less British taxpayers liked it. So far the North ministry had managed to quell the stirrings of revolt in Parliament; how much longer it would be able to do so was an open question.

  As Parliament grew impatient, so did Britain’s commanders in America. British victories in the south were singly satisfying but added up to nothing. American irregulars prevented a consolidation of British control, leaving Clinton and Cornwallis to conclude that they had overrated the Crown’s popularity in that region. Cornwallis, commanding the south after Clinton’s return to New York, refused to spend the rest of his career in America. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventure,” he wrote. “If we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York, and bring our whole force into Virginia. We then have a stake to fight for, and a successful battle may give us America.”

  With Clinton’s approval, Cornwallis headed north, daring Washington to come out and fight. For several weeks Washington declined the dare. The British general swept into Virginia, driving Lafayette from Richmond; but still Washington held back. Cornwallis scattered Steuben’s forces; Washington did not move. Cornwallis dispersed the Virginia legislature at Charlottesville, missing the capture of Governor Jefferson at Monticello by a mere ten minutes. Washington remained aloof.

  Washington’s patience paid off, albeit in an unexpected direction. In August he received word that the long-awaited French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was coming—but not to New York. The French commander had departed the West Indies with twenty-nine warships and 3,000 troops and was bound for the Chesapeake. At once Washington changed plans. He decided to leave Clinton to the comforts of Manhattan, and finally to accept Cornwallis’s challenge. For the whole war Washington had fought an enemy who could take to the waves when backed to the beach; the presence of Grasse would erase that disadvantage. “The moment is critical,” Washington reported to Congress, “the opportunity precious, the prospects most happily favourable.”

  Immediately he wrote Lafayette, who became as excited as Washington. “Should a French fleet now come in Hampton Roads,” Lafayette predicted, “the British army would, I think, be ours.” Washington ordered Lafayette to get south of Cornwallis and prevent at all costs his slipping back into Carolina.

  Washington then began preparing his own troops for a dash south. A master of logistics and preparation, he personally mapped the march and tended to every imaginable matter of provisioning and transport. Clinton’s spies saw signs of motion in Washington’s camp, but the American general spread disinformation indicating that he was simply circling south to assault New York from Staten Island. He sent crews to repair roads and bridges on the Jersey banks of the Hudson. He even constructed a large oven to supply bread to the fictitious attackers. Not till too late did Clinton realize that the object of the preparations was not his army but Cornwallis’s.

  By the time Washington passed through Philadelphia his destination was plain, but by then the cork was in the bottle. Grasse reached the mouth of the Chesapeake at the end of August, and although contrary winds and his own cautiousness prevented an attack on Cornwallis’s rear, the French presence precluded a British naval rescue of Cornwallis.

  After the excitement of preparation and marching, the siege of Yorktown, where Cornwallis made his stand, went slowly. Washington wondered what his counterpart was thinking. “Lord Cornwallis’s conduct,” he remarked in the second week of October, “has hitherto been passive beyond conception. He either has not the means of defence, or he intends to reserve his strength until we approach very near him.”

  The answer was a bit of both. By night Americans constructed emplacements within cannon shot of the British lines; by day the emplacements came under British fire—until they were completed and could return the fire, eventually silencing the British guns. The work was capriciously dangerous. A lieutenant colonel of the Virginia militia, St. George Tucker, recorded in his diary for October 6, “A man was killed by a cannon ball a day or two past without any visible wound. He was lying with his knapsack under his head which was knocked away by the ball, without touching his head.”

  On the British side the situation was worse. Cornwallis went underground to escape the bombardment; others took their pounding at the surface. “An immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable manner,” wrote Tucker, after interrogating a refugee from the siege. Desperate work with bayonets accompanied occasional assaults on British redoubts, but mostly the American and French artillery wore the defenders gradually down. American spirits rose accordingly. “Our shot and shell went over our heads in a continual blaze the whole night,” wrote an American soldier. “The sight was beautifully tremendous.” British spirits traced an inverse arc. “Our provisions are now nearly exhausted and our ammunition totally,” read the entry in one British officer’s
journal for October 16.

  Cornwallis was not the man to fight to the death, nor Virginia the place for him to do so. By October 17, when a hundred American and French guns maintained an unceasing barrage, he had had enough. The sheer noise made surrender difficult. Cornwallis put a drummer on the parapet to signal intent to parley, but no one on the American side could hear him. “He might have beat away till doomsday,” remarked an American officer. But the white handkerchief attracted attention, and the guns fell silent. The next day the surrender was formalized.

  It was exactly four years since the other great American victory of the war, at Saratoga. Heaven itself seemed to endorse the end of the fighting. St. George Tucker described the hours after the surrender:

  A solemn stillness prevailed. The night was remarkably clear and the sky decorated with ten thousand stars. Numberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs which had exhibited a noble firework the night before, but happily divested of all their horror.

  The next day the British troops marched out of the fortress. For nearly two miles American troops lined one side of the road, French troops the other. The British band played “Welcome, Brother Debtor” and other tunes, including “When the King Enjoys His Own Again.” With a different set of words, the latter was called “The World Turned Upside Down,” and it was by this title that Americans remembered it.

  26

  Blessed Work

  1781–82

  “My God! All is over,” moaned Lord North on hearing the news. Whether he meant the war or his ministry was not immediately clear; before long any distinction was moot. Even as King George prayed heaven “to guide me so to act that posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable empire at my door,” the opposition in Parliament was preparing to lay it at North’s. America was not the only issue causing complaints against the ministry, but it was the one the complainers could coalesce about. When a motion for abandonment of the American cause came within one vote of passage, North took this as his cue to resign after twelve years in office. Conventional wisdom was that “Lord North’s war” would follow him off the stage.

  It did, but not without effort—much of it Franklin’s. The final phase of the conflict took him by surprise. “I wish most heartily with you that this cursed war was at an end,” Franklin wrote to one of the British friends with whom he still corresponded, just before news of Yorktown arrived. “But I despair of seeing it finished in my time. Your thirsty nation has not yet drank enough of our blood.”

  It was with something less than despair, but hardly happiness, that Franklin learned he would have responsibility for bringing the war to an end. The Congress refused his request to retire, instead appointing him to a commission to negotiate a peace. He accepted the appointment from a sense of duty. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” he told John Adams, one of his fellow peace commissioners, “that was not censured as inadequate, and the makers condemned as injudicious or corrupt. Blessed are the peace makers is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed. Being as yet rather too much attached to this world, I had therefore no ambition to be concerned in fabricating this peace.” All the same, he assured Adams, he deemed it an honor to serve with him in so important a business, and would work to the best of his ability.

  The Congress named three peace commissioners besides Franklin and Adams. Thomas Jefferson never joined the group, remaining in America. Henry Laurens was an equally unhelpful choice, having been captured by the British on the Atlantic and currently residing in the Tower of London. John Jay was the fifth member; he, Franklin, and Adams did the bulk of the work.

  For the first several months, however, Franklin was the only one of the three in Paris, where the serious talking took place. Adams was in Holland—which had entered the war against Britain, but refused alliance with the United States—trying to pry some guilders out of the Dutch burghers. (Holland’s profit-minded approach to diplomacy moved Franklin to remark, “Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop; and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper.”) John Jay was in Madrid having comparable bad luck with the Spanish, who likewise had declared war on Britain but likewise spurned the Americans. (Franklin urged Jay to hold firm against Spain’s efforts to take advantage of America’s distress, especially regarding the Mississippi. “Poor as we are,” he said, “yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbour might as well ask me to sell my street door.”)

  The instructions from the Congress to the peace commissioners stipulated two nonnegotiable conditions: acknowledgment of America’s independence and the continuation of the treaty with France. The rest was left to the discretion of the commissioners. At the time the instructions were drafted—June 1781—Americans could hardly hope for more. But the victory at Yorktown improved America’s prospects, and Franklin intended to exercise his discretion to the utmost.

  Yet even as Washington reinforced Franklin’s bargaining position, Arthur Lee sapped it. Lee had not wanted Franklin to have anything to do with peace talks, and contended that his appointment as commissioner came only “by the absolute order of France”—as communicated by the French minister in Philadelphia, the Chevalier de la Luzerne. “At this very time, Congress had the fullest evidence and conviction that Dr. Franklin was both a dishonest and incapable man,” Lee asserted. Several members of the Congress had registered concern at the terms of Franklin’s commission, with its instruction to cling to France. “He, good man,” Lee continued sarcastically, “felt no qualms at such a commission, no sense of dishonour or injury to his country. On the contrary, he expressed the utmost alacrity in accepting it, and I believe most cordially, since it puts him in the way of receiving money, which is the God of his idolatry.” As to what this meant for America, “The yoke is riveted upon us…. The French therefore are to make peace for us.”

  Lee’s libels were an extreme version of a sentiment widely shared: that Franklin was unduly partial to France. John Adams thought so. As an early anti-British radical, Adams was hardly an apologist for Britain. “They hate us, universally from the Throne to the footstool,” he said, “and would annihilate us, if in their power.” Yet Adams was equally skeptical of the French. In Adams’s worldview, nations had no friends, only interests. French interests had motivated the alliance with America; French interests—rather than any attachment to republican values, for instance—would continue to motivate French policy after the war. And American interests dictated creating a certain distance from France now that the war was nearly over. Adams’s skepticism was no secret. “He tells me himself,” Franklin reported to Congress, “that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should shew spirit in our applications.”

  John Jay felt similarly. He believed that Vergennes was deliberately delaying the negotiations, from a desire to extend American dependence on France. “It was evident the Count did not wish to see our independence acknowledged by Britain until they had made all their uses of us,” Jay told Robert Livingston, the American foreign secretary, after an interview with Vergennes. Jay saw no reason to share his insight with the French. “We ought not to let France know that we have such ideas; while they think us free from suspicion they will be more open, and we should make no other use of this discovery than to put us on our guard.”

  Franklin had long since stopped answering criticism directed at his person, and he probably would have let the allegations of Francophilia pass had they not threatened what he considered to be essential American interests. “Your enemies industriously publish that your age and indolence have unabled you for your station,” Robert Morris wrote; “that a sense of obligation to France seals your lips when you should ask
their aid; and that (whatever your friends may say to the contrary) both your connections and influence at Court are extremely feeble.” Morris said he related this information as a friend, but he added that many in Congress believed the allegations. Moreover, those who censured Franklin were the ones most vocal in their censure of France.

  Franklin responded that he was “extremely sorry” to hear the railing against France, as it tended to hurt “the good understanding” that had existed between the governments of France and the United States. “There seems to be a party with you that wish to destroy it. If they could succeed, they would do us irreparable injury.” The help of France had been crucial to America’s success at arms, and it remained crucial to America’s success at diplomacy. “It is our firm connection with France that gives us weight with England, and respect throughout Europe. If we were to break our faith with this nation, on whatever pretence, England would again trample on us, and every other nation despise us.” Franklin acknowledged the prudence of allowing the British to hope for a reconciliation with their former colonies, but America’s polestar must be Paris. “The true political interest of America consists in observing and fulfilling, with the greatest exactitude, the engagements of our alliance with France.”

  The negotiations began in earnest with the arrival of Richard Oswald in France in April 1782. Oswald was the representative of the new ministry in London, which was headed by Lord Rockingham and included Charles James Fox as foreign minister and Lord Shelburne as secretary of state for home and colonial affairs. Oswald impressed all who knew him with his honesty and fair-mindedness. Henry Laurens— writing from his London cell—called him “a gentleman of the strictest candour and integrity.” Vergennes asserted, “He is a wise man who seems not to have even the idea of intrigues. Rich himself, devoid of ambition, he has yielded to his friendship for Lord Shelburne in coming here, and he does not claim other recompense than the glory of rendering a useful service to his homeland and to humanity.”